Category : Digital Analytics

In the digital arena, all types of businesses like to make an impact in the online world. They invest heavily on building a website which is a crucial entry point for consumers. Such hefty investment leads us to a very important set of questions revolving around whether it is working for their business or not. So, knowing the performance of your website is imperative to gauge the return on your investment.

Measuring is always a second step, with the very first step being getting the measurement tools in place. Before taking an important decision based on the performance metrics, you should make sure that the measurement tools are properly set up and that the data coming through is accurate. From the web analytics stand point, this means that the analytics implementation (be it Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics) should be comprehensive, flawless and as per the best practices.

In this blog, we have listed down 5 important checks you should carry out to know the health of analytics implementation on your website. You can carry out these checks for any website and not just yours. To keep the explanation simple, I have considered GA implementation here. You might have to convert these ideas based on the analytics tool you use.

Google Analytics is one of those tools that every marketer or website owner has used at least once. It is such a versatile tool that it can be leveraged equally well for small, simple website as well as large, complex ones. Google Analytics will start generating useful insights and give out tracking details as soon as you implement it, but what about going a level deeper. What are some of the things that you can do with Google Analytics to get more out of it?

A digital analytics tool can provide enterprises with several custom or standard reports and dashboards today. But the real relevance of that data lies in teams being able to find the right answers at the right time. Because of the sheer amount of data that is being produced by companies, it has become difficult for business users to locate the relevant metrics that contain the insights they need for decision-making. This problem is further compounded by the fact that data is spread out over multiple tools. The outcome of this situation is usually an inadequate solution to a business problem, or worse still, a wrong one that eventually leads to undesired business outcomes and a colossal waste of time and resources.

As organizations are getting ready for the inevitable future – complete digitization of customer-facing organizational systems and using digital analytics to determine customer behaviors and trends – it would be more than safe to assume that digital analytics is the foreseeable necessity that organizations are going to be relying upon to drive better business results.

And what’s more, organizations are not shying away from spending the big bucks on data analytics today. One of the recent articles from Harvard Business Review on ‘Quantifying the Impact of Marketing Analytics’ states that “companies currently spend 6.7% of their marketing budgets on analytics and expect to spend 11.1% over the next three years. As digital analytics is revolutionizing the way we approach business today – it would be worthwhile to understand the digital analytics strategy that organizations are adopting in order to drive positive business outcomes.

According to a recent survey of chief marketing officers (CMOs) by IBM Institute for Business Value, only 13% of global organizations are using advanced analytics to capture customer insight across touch points and only 16% have integrated customer touch points across physical and digital channels. Despite the significant rise in data management and analytics techniques, the number of marketers successfully utilizing digital analytics is very dismal. Digital analytics goes much beyond tracking the website and getting frequent reports about the performance. The large pools of data available to the marketers today hold many golden balls of insights that marketers need to look for, and transform into threads of stories that revolve around their customers.

Modern business decision-making depends largely on data, but inaccurate data can make you lose everything or stall your growth. Today, businesses have to deal with different online and offline channels to gather information on a wide range of issues like market trends, customer behavior, competitors’ strategies, and more. As businesses grow, many new sources of data get added constantly and this data is handled by many different teams and resources. Over a period of time, lack of effective data governance and management results in loss of quality, consistency, and accuracy of the data gathered. And so, businesses end up making decisions that rely on faulty data.

As a marketer, are you satisfied with the results of your attention grabbing advertisements, and persuasive content? Has the inclusion of digital media channels in your marketing mix proven effective for your organization? You may rely on data from the digital media to find answers to such questions. The plethora of data available in the digital age may either overwhelm you, or make you complacent.

Well, that could be your biggest marketing blind spot. No doubt, digital media is the most powerful marketing strategy, offering useful data to measure the impact of your tactics against the set goals. However, without a deeper analysis of the data, you may not be able to find the elusive answer to why a certain action did not take place. Software that power the digital channels mostly answer the “what” and not the “why” of that particular issue.

Launched a nifty website and think that your job is done? You must proactively measure how your website scores in terms of various relevant metrics. See we have deliberately used the word “relevant.” Why? Because there are innumerable metrics to track, but you should adhere to the ones that have to do with the industry you are operating in. So now, you need a powerful tracking tool cut out for your purpose. And Google Analytics is a great choice for webmasters. Getting started with Google Analytics is as simple as ABC, but when it comes to going beyond the usual and getting new insights from the tool, the task gets a little tricky.

Every company is investing heavily in digital analytics – be it on implementing the right tool or hiring the best resources. According to a recent report, companies are planning to increase their spending on marketing analytics by 73% in the next three years. Marketing managers are expecting analytics to churn out incredible and timely insights that can help them in better targeting and optimize their digital marketing initiatives. Digital analytics, if done intelligently, can actually do just that, and much more.

Your website, blog, mobile app/site are all set and now you want to find out how your visitors are behaving on your digital properties. You would immediately Google the latest feature-rich analytics tool and add the tracking code to your website without giving a second thought. From the next day, you would expect some deep insights from the tool about how your visitors react. Sounds familiar? Many new website owners follow the same routine. But after a few months go by, they realize that the data they are getting is somewhat accurate but not good enough for basing decisions. Moreover, the data coming in from various channels is confusing and cannot be integrated to get meaningful results. They are not able to achieve the insights they are after and the analytics tool just becomes a dashboard that tells how many people visited and how many bounced.